“Sir?”
“How much longer to jump?”
“We should be ready in seventeen minutes, sir.” Five assault transports were still coming in; their carriers would jump as soon as they were aboard, and
Sinclaire turned on his tactical officer. “How long before the torpedoes reach the corona?”
“Just under two minutes, sir,” he replied, noting that the torpedoes had now run out of fuel and were coasting on toward their target. “If what I’ve heard about the kryolons is right, we’ll have about fifteen minutes from initiation of the kryolon reaction – that’ll be upon detonation in the corona – to the first stellar debris reaching us here.” He looked helpless for a moment. “But that’s just a guess.”
“Better than nothing, lad,” Sinclaire said quickly. “Zhirinovski, you’ve got ten minutes to get the other ships out of here. Tell the transports to push it past the limit. If they’re not back aboard by then, they get left behind.” Five minutes was not much of a safety margin, but it was all he could give them.
“Aye, sir!”
“Captain Jorgensen,” Sinclaire spoke into the comm link to the ship’s bridge, “we’ve got a problem.”
“Sir?” the captain answered immediately, her attention riveted on the old sailor’s face in the screen.
“Have
“Aye, admiral,” Jorgensen answered. “We’re ready any time, sir.”
Sinclaire nodded.
“What about her?” Nicole demanded quietly, nodding toward Jodi’s image. Her eyes were closed, head down.
“She’s right, lass,” Sinclaire said as gently as he could. “You couldn’t get there in time to help her. You’d only die, too. Perhaps… keeping her company might be best. No one likes to go out of this world alone, and Lord knows she’s earned what little comfort any of us can provide.”
Nicole nodded in resignation, now welcoming Braddock’s arm around her shoulder. But she looked up suddenly at Jodi’s voice.
“Nicole,” she said in a whisper, “It’s Thorella. I think he’s coming…”
Fifty-Nine
Reza did not have to see what was taking place throughout the Empire; he could sense it. He was spiritually reconnected with Her Children, with the Bloodsong again echoing in his veins. He could again sense Her will, and knew that a great Change was about to take place, something that would alter his people forever and take them to the next step in their evolution as a species. Wherever they were, warriors and clawless ones waited for the rapture that they knew was about to come, only moments away now. Even the hapless males that had been evacuated from the nurseries knew that something was happening, for while they were witless creatures with but a single function in life, they, too, were bound to Her will. And in their own way, they felt the tremor in the life force that bound them all to one another, that was the endless thread of life that the Kreela called the Way. While they did not realize it in their blissful ignorance, they had been redeemed, and the glory and honor that had once been theirs was about to be again in the new form that was soon to come.
But Reza’s mind was yet troubled, for there remained one task for him to complete. He did not have to ask his Empress for what he desired, for in Her great wisdom, She already knew.
“I know of the one you seek,” She told him. “Do this thing and return to Me, my love. For our time here grows short; the new dawn is soon upon us.”
“I shall not be long, my Empress,” he replied, his hand fastened about the handle of the ancient sword Tesh-Dar had once given him.
“Let it be done.”
And Reza vanished.
Jodi’s plan would have worked completely had she only remembered to turn off the display monitors on the drones like the one that had brought her to engineering. She had finally cut Thorella off from accessing any of the other systems on the ship. But she had forgotten that one little thing.
Thorella was laying on his back, his head and shoulders buried in the ship’s central computer core in a vain attempt to figure out what was ailing the
“Thorella launched these things?” he heard someone say. “On whose authority?”
“His own, of course,” came a choked reply. “He’s never needed anyone else’s.”
Thorella did not need to hear any more.
“Mackenzie,” he hissed, withdrawing himself from the computer’s innards and pushing past the single-minded drone. His blaster in hand, he quickly made his way aft, to the one section of the ship he had not taken the time to check.
Engineering.
Jodi saw him on the monitor outside the door.
“He’s here,” she sighed, trembling inwardly. “Oh, shit.” She tried to hold the blaster she had taken from the small weapons vault near the door, but her broken fingers could not hold it right. Even with both hands.
“Jodi,” Nicole said from very, very far away, “can he get to you?”
He stood in front of the door, looking straight into the video pickup. Smiling.
“I don’t think so,” she said. But then he held up what could only be a coded magnetic key, and she watched in horror as he swiped it across the door’s access panel. She had no way of knowing, but Borge had made sure Thorella was provided with a proper commander’s key for the ship that could open any door. “Oh, shit,” she moaned. “Yes, he can get in…”
“Jodi, try to–”
The door slid open.
“Game’s over, bitch,” Thorella said quietly as he leveled his blaster at her stomach. He would make sure she died, but he did not want to hurry her along too much.
“Fuck you, you bastard son of a who–”
Something unexpected happened just as Thorella squeezed the trigger. There was a blast of frigid air, a moving shadow, a high keening sound that Jodi thought she had heard before. But only the gun that was pointed at her mattered, the gun with a bore that seemed as big around as an irrigation pipe.
In a slow motion dream she saw Reza appear out of thin air to her left, his mouth open in a snarl of rage that she could not hear, his arm held out before him as if… as if he had… thrown something? In front of her, only a few paces away, she watched Thorella’s face glow in the backlight of the blast his weapon made as it fired. But there was something odd about it, she thought, odd about his hand, the weapon. It took her an eternal moment to realize
